India’s External Storage Market Witnessing Explosion: Dell EMC
Dell EMC believes in: store, protect and manage your information—with guaranteed satisfaction and future-proof protection. No matter the use case or business demands, Dell EMC data storage systems help you do more, move faster, and perform better.
In a chat, Anil Sethi, VP, Channels, Dell EMC India, tells us more. Excerpts:
BW CIO: Please elaborate on Dell EMC’s storage portfolio and benefits.
Anil Sethi: With more people becoming digital friendly and new concepts like Internet of Things (IoT) emerging as a global phenomenon, the sudden surge in data generation has forced the businesses all over the world to refurbish their IT infrastructure as well as re-imagine their business strategies.
Here, IT transformation has to include a transformation of how data is managed, and therefore, the approach to storage.
Hence, we at Dell EMC, ensure that we give the best solutions to our customers, especially as organizations are moving from traditional storage methods to realizing the need of modern ones. The relationship of businesses’ with data is changing and Dell EMC provides holistic solutions which helps them to simplify the storage processes, be able to deliver on-demand business needs and be able to customize owing to different needs by different enterprises.
According to IDC in Q1 2017, Dell EMC is #1 in the India storage market with 43.4 percent market share (by revenue). The Software Defined Storage software portfolio that Dell EMC offers includes:
* Dell EMC Scale IO, a hyper converged solution that acts as a turbo charges for an enterprise’s data center. Scale IO uses existing servers and turns them into a software defined SAN with massive scalability and better performance features with minimal cost.
* Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage software, a new generation of applications based software that takes care of next-generations applications at a lower cost than a public cloud. With its cloudscale, geo-federated namespace, multi-tenant security and in-place analytics, Elastic Cloud storage is the universal platform at the center of everything IoT.
* Dell EMC IsilonSD edge, a massive storage giant packed with the power of software-defined storage solution, IsilonSD edge can store, manage and protect an enterprise’s unstructured data easily. The IsilonSD edge is also backed by industry’s #1 scale-out NAS platform, that efficiently supports a wide range of workload, analyze more data, while easily scaling performance and capability.
Also, we recently expanded the industry-leading mid-range storage portfolio with two SC all-Flash data storage arrays, along with key software updates to Dell EMC Unity, designed to boost efficiency and cost savings for mixed block and file workloads.
This offers premium performance and enterprise-ready features and the SC all-Flash arrays are designed to help customers modernize their data centers to gain more speed, efficiency and cost-savings from existing applications. It also helps customers open up possibilities for the business to support new flash-enabled use cases and workloads.
BW CIO: How is All- Flash crucial for digital and IT transformation?
Anil Sethi: The adoption of flash technology is rising in India. India’s external storage market is witnessing an explosion due to new age demands from emerging technologies such as real time business analytics, augmented reality and Internet of Things (IoT). Hence, All-Flash storage is getting more prominence among the Indian organizations like never before, as per IDC.
According to the recent study by Frost & Sullivan, the aggressive evaluation of the All-Flash technology has led to a positive shift towards its adoption. In fact, 70 percent of enterprises in India expect to have an all-Flash storage infrastructure to support most business critical applications by 2020. Hence, to provide the best in class solutions to the customers, Dell EMC offers a bandwagon of all-Flash solutions that are purpose-build to address virtually any enterprise data center use case:
* XtremIO: This solution by Dell EMC is designed to address most high-end enterprise workloads with some of the industry’s best inline data compression and de-duplication capabilities for improved economics.
* VMAX: VMAX All Flash offers the gold standard of replication, recovery, data services and quality of service, re-engineered with all flash to deliver up to four petabytes of storage capacity.
* Unity: A family of simple, affordable storage systems that deliver enterprise capabilities, all-flash performance and cloud-like simplicity cost-effectively. Unity supports file and block storage for small and medium-sized IT departments and is available in all-flash array, hybrid array, software-defined and converged configurations.
Verticals such as the banking & financial sector as well as the telecom sector are playing a huge role in driving this growth. All in all, Flash storage sees a huge potential in India market and Dell EMC is already playing a critical role in aiding enterprises achieve their IT transformation.
BW CIO: What are the benefits of future-proof storage loyalty program?
Anil Sethi: The new Dell EMC Future-Proof Storage Loyalty program offers customers guarantees and value through the lifetime of their arrays. Unlike other vendor programs that offer fewer benefits and short-term promises, the Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program provides robust guarantees, money-saving benefits and investment protection for new Dell EMC Unity and SC Series product purchases.
The Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program for Dell EMC Unity and SC Series includes:
* Three-year satisfaction guarantee – Dell EMC products will perform as advertised for customers, satisfaction guaranteed.
* 4:1 All-Flash Storage Efficiency Guarantee – Offered without complex pre-assessments and restrictions.
* Never-worry Data Migrations – Customers can seamlessly upgrade to new Dell EMC storage with built-in data migrations that are always online and non-disruptive.
* Hardware Investment Protection – Customers get flexible credit towards storage controller upgrades or trade-in credit towards the purchase of any new product across the Dell EMC portfolio.
* All-inclusive Software – Dell EMC midrange storage products ship with everything needed to store, manage and protect data with no extra licenses to purchase or maintain.
* Built-in Virtustream Storage Cloud (for Dell EMC Unity only) – Customers can automatically tier files and storage snapshots to the cloud with no capacity costs for one year, up to the program allotment.
Customers purchasing new Dell EMC Unity or SC Series products, whether direct or through channel partners, have a valid maintenance contract are eligible for the program at no additional cost.
BW CIO: What is Dell EMC’s go-to-market strategy?
Anil Sethi: India is one of the most important geographies for us and we continue to invest in developing our partners here and help them increase their profitability, through initiatives like the Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program.
Presently, Dell EMC has over 4,000 registered partners in India and over 40 strategic partners. Channel partners are an important part of the Dell EMC strategy, currently responsible for about 45 percent of the company's revenues in India. Along with this, we have a best in class, unified channel partner program. This program has been very aggressive and covers every single product and types of market in India, allowing cross selling across enterprise and commercial.
The program also includes incentives for new businesses. The main objective of the integrated channel program is to increase reach as well as improve partner profitability. The new partner program is based on three tenets – Simple, Predictable and Profitable.
Apart from our channel initiatives, we have also invested heavily in India with sales and marketing operations as well as in research and development on server, storage and software products. India is a strategic market for us and we are also looking at JAM (Jan Dhan-Aadhar-Mobile) initiatives of the government to strengthen its footholds in the country.
We recently unveiled our Internet of Things (IoT) vision and strategy, a new IoT division as well as new IoT specific products, labs, partner program and consumption models. We are commitment to helping customers realize their digital future by safely navigating the complex and often fragmented IoT landscape.
Overall, one year post merger, Dell EMC has a strong holistic portfolio from edge to core; empowering partners and enabling customers to realize their digital future through IT, security and workforce transformation and helping them evolve digitally.
